Anita Cacchioli is an outstanding senior director and an inspirational leader with an exceptional track record of delivery within large, complex organisations and challenging environments.

A former director of environment, culture and sport at Reading Borough Council, Anita is highly credible with clear strategic vision, excellent communication skills and the natural ability to influence and motivate diverse stakeholders to achieve all objectives.

She has held numerous executive and non-executive director and chairmanship roles across the public, private, and not for profic sectors.

Now with her own company ANCA Management Resources, she has also stepped into the role as Business Post’s management coach. This is her latest lesson:

The dictionary defines a goal as the object of a person’s ambition or effort; an aim or desired result, the aim or object towards which an endeavour is directed, the destination of a journey.

Let’s just think about the concept of a journey.

Before setting off on a long journey, you have a reason for undertaking it, you know where you are starting from, you know where you want to go, when you want to be there, and how you will get to your destination and what you will need to enable you to do so.

You will have also considered what might possibly adversely impact on arriving at your destination, as and when planned, and taken action to reduce that possibility.

Likewise, when you set goals for yourself or your business, you have clear aims and objectives towards which to channel your effort and energy.

Most successful people in business are goal-oriented. They take time to identify what it is that they want and they build up a clear and detailed picture of what achieving the goal will look like and feel like.

Then they go about taking regular and consistent action to move them towards their goal. Setting goals in this way gives purpose, focus, direction and aids motivation.

Without goals you are likely to be drifting and when you drift you are not in control; if you are not in control, then other people and circumstances are.

You have relinquished your basic right to shape your own future.

In doing this, you also surrender your freedom of action, which restricts your choices and can lead to frustration, anxiety, fear and stress.

Now for some questions:

- Are you in the habit of setting goals for yourself and your business?

- Are your goals written down?

- How committed are you to all your goals?

- In what ways do you work towards them constantly?

- Do you remember some of them for a while and then gradually forget them all together?

- Do you find your goals hard to achieve and get despondent, or are you already high achieving in terms of goal realisation?

Many people haven’t a clue about what they really want. If you ask them what they want at work, they will often tell you the things that they don’t want.

The problem is you get what you focus on. The subconscious mind will work to achieve the things that you think about most of the time, whether you want them or not.

Take the analogy of a young child playing in the kitchen.

You say: “Don’t go into the cupboard.”

They don’t discriminate. They pick up on the words “Go into the cupboard” and before you know it the contents of the cupboard are strewn across the floor.

The power of the subconscious has a tremendous effect on the achievement of goals.

Test this out for yourself over the next few weeks, set yourself and colleagues some observational goals.

For example, notice red cars on the way home or people on the bus or train wearing the colour purple.

Choose any potential subject; the task is to note the effect that setting these goals has on your own and colleagues’ perception.

After a few days, ask a colleague who has been noticing red cars how many blue cars were on the road?

Or the colleague noticing people wearing purple, how many people on the bus or train were wearing green?

Okay, so we get what we focus on!

What’s your destination?

Do you have a blueprint for what you want to achieve ultimately?

A clear understanding of where you are going?

A good understanding of where you are now and thus the steps you need to take to arrive at your destination?

What? Why? How? When? are simple concepts and when applied to thinking about your goals, bring them into focus and closer to reality.